Surviving and Thriving

Edited transcript from a lecture given at Grace Valley Christian Center Saturday evening (8 p.m.), May 9, 1998

How do we as Christians survive in this Age of Aquarius, the goddess who brings spiritual water to assuage our thirst, in this age of pagan spirituality that will answer all our problems, both personally and as a planet? How do we as Christians survive and thrive in that atmosphere?

Well, one wonderful thing we can do is turn back to the Scriptures. I have found, in my studies of this kind of material, a certain sense of oppression. As I spend hours in my office, sometimes late at night when I am the only person there and it goes dark and I am still working on this awful stuff-it makes me think of St. Irenaeus, who studied the Gnostics and spoke about “looking into the abyss of madness.” And yet, looking into this seems to make the New Testament come alive again-if it has started to look a little too well-known, too familiar-because the New Testament was written in a period like ours is becoming, in a world that was joined together by pagan syncretism.

In New Testament times, everybody believed in the gods, and many of the leaders believed that they were gods; that’s why you could call Caesar “lord.” It was a pagan system that was international in its scope and totalitarian in its claims. You know, really the only people that ever got martyred were the Christians. Isn’t that odd? I don’t know of any case of Gnostics getting martyred. Think about that. Christian liberals don’t get martyred. When you read the New Testament in that light, in terms of the ambient radical paganism all around, what the New Testament is saying becomes alive all over again.

A World in Conflict

You see, the Bible keeps telling us that we live in a divided and conflictual situation. The biblical paradigm is not the seated Buddha, arms around his stomach, welcoming all to planetary peace and love with the exhortation, “Don’t do something; sit there.” No, it’s rather the conflict between Moses and Pharaoh, and all those occult forces behind Egyptian religion; it’s the conflict between Adam and Eve on the one hand and the serpent on the other; it’s the conflict between Jesus and the tempter in the wilderness, with the call: “Choose this day whom you will serve,” and the implied, “Don’t sit there; do something!” There is indeed conflict, and it has always marked human history. Those who try to tell us that the only solution is to eliminate the very notion of conflict are only giving proof to the New Testament.

Apostle to the Pagans

I suggest that we turn once more to the apostle Paul, in his letter to the Colossians. Paul presented himself as the apostle to the pagans. Sometimes we translate it “apostle to the Gentiles,” but I think that’s too nice a term. Apostle to the pagans. This particular letter is written to recently converted Greco-Roman pagans in the vast majority, with one or two Jewish converts to Christianity, in a house church in Colosse, the Roman province of Asia, present-day Turkey. He describes these ex-pagans as those who “once belonged to the basic principles of this world” (Colossians 2:20).

That’s a funny phrase, isn’t it-”the basic principles of this world”? I read a commentator who I think has much insight who believes that what Paul is speaking about is pagan occult animism and enthrallment to personal angelic spirits; the “basic elements of the world” being, of course, that worship of the creation rather than the creator. Paul warns these Colossians about being seduced by hollow and deceptive philosophy. He talks about some liberals in the church who have lost connection with Christ the head. He warns these Christians not to be deceived, not to follow the old pagan spiritual paths now masquerading as a form of Christianity. The situation sounds very modern, doesn’t it? Paul could have been writing to a mainline denominational church today.

A Statement of Christian Theism

The Colossian Christians were in a situation similar to that of the Christians in Lyons at the time of St. Potinus and St. Irenaeus, who were attacked on the one hand by the pagan authorities, the civil government, and on the other hand by the Gnostic heretics within the church. One of the things Paul does as he is exhorting these Christians, calling them to faithfulness, is to give to them the wonderful statement of Christian theism found in Colossians 1:15-20.

I like to divide this passage into two verses or strophe. It has a sort of a creedal or hymnal font to it simply because of the repetitions. You’ll notice that there are two basic parts to this statement of what is fundamental Christian belief, and it seems as if there are virtually two titles: “Firstborn of all creation” and “Firstborn from the dead.” These function as two specific statements of what Paul wants to emphasize.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:15-20)

Can you imagine anybody writing that? The genius! Just from the literary point of view, the way this thing is structured, the way it holds together, it’s a piece of literary brilliance! But forget about the literary stuff. I enjoy doing that, but that’s not the point. What about the content? Doesn’t it blow you away? The depth of the insight of this man of God, placing before these ex-pagans, now tempted to return to paganism, what is the essence of the Christian faith.

The Gospel: Christ is the Creator

What is the essence of the Christian faith? The first thing that Paul brings to this church under attack from the inside and from the outside is the massive statement that Christ is the Creator. How often do we hear that in our churches anymore? Oh, Jesus is the Savior who will “Hale-Bopp” us out of here the first possible chance and put us on that train road up into heaven. We have a sort of absentee gospel where the best place for us is somewhere else, not here, so we’re going to sort of “gut it out.” This is because all we hear in the preaching today is that Jesus is the Savior, and that Jesus will mysteriously rapture us out of here and let the world go to hell.

But is this what Paul is saying here? No, he is actually saying that the gospel begins with the massive statement that Christ is the Creator. We’ve lost that emphasis in our churches, so much so that the Roman Catholic theologian Richard Grigg can write a book, “When God becomes Goddess-the Radical Transformation of American Religion.” He argues that God has to become goddess, because the idea of God has been reduced to mere personal experience and is therefore no longer a viable notion for the solving of the planet’s great problems.

We have reduced God to some kind of personal Savior. Now, he is that. But is that all we say about Christ? How far we have slipped from the grandeur of the affirmations of the New Testament, that he is the firstborn of all creation, that in him all things were created in heaven and on earth, and that by him all things hold together!

The ancient Gnostics hated the Creator. They were happy to hear about some kind of redemption, and they were willing to reinterpret the Christ of the Bible as some kind of Gnostic redeemer who delivers us from the flesh and shows us how to be pure spirit, but they eliminated from their so-called “Christian” confession the notion of God as Creator, therefore closing their minds, as pagans do, to all the evidence of God’s handiwork in the creation that he has made.

At the end of that process, of course, is the affirmation that we create our own reality, or that the world itself is its own generator, that all this incredible structure and detail and complexity just comes from nothing, in a miraculous kind of way, from the creation itself, from the reality of the cosmos. That’s a way of divinizing the creation and turning away from the reality of the One who created and imposed that order on all things.

You know, in spite of all that I’ve said about the onrush of monism, this is a fabulous time to be a theist. This is a wonderful time to be affirming that God created the heavens and the earth. Darwinism is in an incredibly difficult situation right now. It’s got as many holes as a Swiss cheese. But as people are turning away from Darwinism, they’re jumping to all kinds of odd solutions, like macroevolution. Microevolution is no longer plausible, because the process takes too long. The universe is too young for the chances to take place that would produce all the kinds of organisms we have. So intelligent scientists have ditched microevolution for macroevolution. It takes an incredible leap of faith to believe in happy monsters.

One scholar has worked out the probability of the likelihood of putting together the average protein with its 445 amino acids. The chance that this could happen is 10 to the power 123; that’s a figure with 120 zeros after it-just to produce one protein. And then we have to hope that chance will cause that protein to reproduce itself again, and to reproduce itself in even more complexity and design. The gospel is incredibly appropriate for today as we discover, thanks to molecular biology, the unbelievable complexity and design in everything that God has made. The gospel tells us that it is Christ who is the Creator of that wonderful beauty.

Intelligence Precedes Creation

You know, Paul is expressing a notion of Christ as Creator that is not only to be found in this text in Colossians. We actually find this in many places, but our minds have perhaps been closed to seeing it. You know how the gospel of John begins. Certainly Christ the Word is presented as the Redeemer. He is the only begotten God who took on flesh and gave us authority to become the children of God. He came to his own, but his own received him not. But as many as received him, he redeemed them, he saved them. So the Word is the Redeemer. But you remember that the Word that is the Redeemer, the Word that was with God from the absolute beginning, is also the Word through whom all things were created. And so that Word is the Word that constitutes creation.

It is very interesting to note that proteins and DNA and the like are actually much more complex than any of our modern day computers. They’re like telephone centrals, with all those thousands and millions of wires coming and going. But while scientists have described the structure, they’ve not really described where the “sense” comes from. They’ve not answered the question: Who is it who’s picking up the phone and actually sending messages through the wires? You see, there is sense in the universe that is independent of the physical structure of the universe. The physical structure is merely a carrier of the sense that’s been placed in the universe, the significance, the meaning. How interesting it is to see that the Bible says: “In the beginning was the Word.” Intelligence precedes anything else. The creation is simply made to be a carrier of intelligence. Christ is the Word that speaks meaning into the creation he made.

The letter to the Hebrews compares Christ to the angels, and says Christ is not an angel. “To which of the angels did God ever say, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for my feet’?” Rather, “He makes his angels winds, his servants flames of fire.” But of the Son he says, “In the beginning, O Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.” This Son, who in the last days brings redemption, is also the one who made the earth. So you can see that Colossians 1 is not the only place where we read that Christ is the Creator.

Christ, the Image of God

Christ is the image of the invisible God. This is a fundamental statement of theism. Only Christ is the image of God. We are not. We are created in the image of God in the sense that we share in God’s moral character and personhood, but only Christ is the image of God, the exact expression of his glory, as Hebrews says. Paul is telling us that Christ the Creator is not on the side of the creation but on the side of the Creator. We are being introduced here to the mystery of the Trinity. There, of course, is the origin of meaning and sense in our cosmos, because it’s already there in the Trinitarian discourse of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. It can never be said of us that we are the exact representation of God’s being. That is said of Christ. We will never be divine. We will always be creatures. We will never share the same substance with God. We will always be-from our creation ex nihilo from the great mind and word of God-creatures, and time won’t change that. But Christ is the image of the invisible God.

Christ is also the firstborn of all creation. Now you could understand that phrase in a couple of ways. Is Paul saying here that Christ is the first creature? No; if that were true, maybe the monists would be right. But there’s a whole usage in the Bible of “firstborn” as meaning “someone who has the preeminence over.” David, who was not the firstborn, is called God’s firstborn. So the idea of firstborn here is the idea of priority and superiority, as the firstborn was given authority, given the right to rule. It’s in that sense that Christ rules the creation he made.

Witnesses for Creation

Let me just say this before we move to the second stanza: If Christ is the Creator, this has implications for you. We cannot, like the Gnostics, turn our back on the creation. We cannot dismiss it as just a system that’s going to hell. God created the world and seven times called it “good.” If the gospel includes in its major first stanza that Christ is the Creator, we have no right to turn our backs on the creation. That means that wherever God places you in the creation, you will be a witness to God the Creator. That means that whatever you do, in whatever field you might find yourself, that you can glorify and worship God as the Creator. You can even do it as a football coach, because God made us the way we are, and we need to express that in what we do.

Of course in this day and age that means that we affirm before this world one particular thing from which this culture is running-namely, whether we’re males or females. The first thing God tells us is that he creates us male or female. He doesn’t create each one of us, as Tony Campolo tells us, male and female, so that we have parts of both male and female in us and we need to become androgynous. One of the ways that the Gnostics ran away from God the Creator was to deny sexual distinctions, just the way the monists want to get rid of distinctions. The great goal is really androgyny.

Can Christians do this? Can Christians who were created by God the Creator deny the creational structures? The Gnostics called upon women to flee maternity, because in being mothers they were placing themselves once more under the power of this evil creator. We need to celebrate the creation in the way God has constituted things. This great rush to eliminate distinctions, to erase all differences, is a rushing away from God, from Christ the Creator.

The Gospel: The Creator is the Redeemer

The second stanza tells us that Christ who is the Creator is also the Redeemer, the firstborn from the dead. The Creator is also the Savior. In this affirmation I see three things: condescendence, efficaciousness, and radicality. As Paul speaks about the gospel, he’s telling us that the Creator is the Redeemer. It’s not an angel, not some kind of holy guru, but God the Creator himself, the watchmaker, who fixes the watch. The Creator saves the creation.

Our sinful hearts need to be arrested and broken by the very notion of God the Creator’s condescension. You see, for the Creator to save implies his condescension. This is the ultimate expression of love. The Creator so loves his creation that he sets aside the glory that is his and takes on a human form. So we are faced, in redemption, with the glorious love of the Creator.

God didn’t create because he was bored, with nothing to do. He created because he loved the creation he made; he created because he desired communion with his creation. That’s why God comes to redeem the creation in love. There’s no other gospel than that. Nothing else rings as true, in terms of an expression of radical love, than the love of the Creator becoming the Redeemer.

Of course, it’s also efficacious-it works-because only the Redeemer can do it. Angels can’t save the creation. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. We are helpless to lift ourselves up into some kind of divine power to save ourselves, in spite of what Mikhail Gorbachev and Ted Turner and Bishop Spong and Bishop Swing, and Bishop Tutu say. Only God can save. The gospel is efficacious. It provides us with a real answer, a powerful, efficacious answer, to our problem. It is in Christ’s condescension that there is any unity. It pleased God to cause fullness to dwell in him. He is the center of unity in the cosmos, not some kind of abstract monistic notion that we’re all divine. It’s efficacious too because the blood of Christ is without price. Only the shedding of the blood of the Creator on the cross can wipe away our sin; so Paul says, “He made peace by the blood of the cross.”

The great seduction, the great error of monistic paganism, is to have people think that they can save themselves. They try to save themselves not by turning without, to the God who is outside the creation, who made it, who in grace stooped down to save it; they turn within to save themselves. But the Bible says the heart is deceitful and wicked, desperately wicked-who can know it? The answer comes to Jeremiah: “I, the Lord, know the heart.” God knows our heart. The great lie of the devil is, as Shirley MacLaine says, “My higher self is always loving.” I suppose some of her husbands would have preferred to have been married to her higher self.

The Resurrection

It is theism that gives us the most radical solution to our biggest problem. Gorbachev and the State of the World Forum are concerned about saving the earth. But there is one thing that Gorbachev and all his power and all the power of all those people that he’s brought cannot do-and that’s give life to a dead body. It’s because they can’t do that, that they are so totally focused on this world-it has to happen here and it has to happen now, within thirty years. I think we need to call the bluff of these people. They’re not radical enough. They want big changes, but can any of them give life to a dead cadaver?

You know, when John bent down and looked in the tomb, he didn’t just see the empty tomb. He saw the empty grave clothes. I used to think, in reading that text, that he saw the signs of a well brought up young man, as Jesus obviously would have been, who, having been raised from the dead, took of the shroud and folded it up and set it there in its place, and that John saw these folded grave clothes as a sign that God is the God of order. But actually what John saw, if you read the Greek carefully, was the grave clothes that covered the body in their place. Then he saw the scarf that was around the head, that kept the mouth closed, in its place, maintaining the circle of the head. In other words, the body of Jesus had gone right through the grave clothes.

The power of the Creator as the Redeemer is shown in the resurrection. The resurrection is the redemption. It’s not simply the redemption of your soul; it’s the transformation of your body. There was no body in the tomb. It was empty, because God is in the business of saving the creation, including the physical characteristics of this creation. The body of Jesus was transformed. It was glorified.

That’s why Paul says flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. We don’t have what it takes. We don’t have the power to do what God will do to this creation that he loves and will redeem. We serve a God in the gospel who is both Creator and Redeemer, who loves the work he made, declared it good (though it was fallen by sin), and who will never let it go. He will change our mortal bodies to immortal bodies, but in the meantime he says we have this treasure in earthen vessels. Paul doesn’t say, “Throw away those earthen vessels; they’re useless!” He says this is the locus where the gospel will be lived out. Paul says we will all be judged, as we stand before the judgment seat of Christ, for things we have done in this body, for the way we have been as creatures, living for the praise and glory of the Creator. That’s what God will ask you when you stand before the judgment seat of Christ: “Were you a faithful and true creature?”

Twelve Rules for Surviving and Thriving

What can we do? I have a few points for surviving and thriving. I think we need to get hold of the gospel in the breadth of what it says, and stop reducing it to something that it is not. This is the message we have to bring to this world that thinks it can save itself. Basically what I’ve done tonight is to go through the gospel that you know, but trying to take into account this revival of monistic paganism, and the answer that Paul gives to it. I have twelve practical things that I’d like to suggest.

1. We need to acknowledge we have a problem. I think Christian America has been asleep, and in many ways we’ve lost the battle before we knew there was a battle. I think we’re on the road to becoming a pagan nation, and short of a major revival this may very well happen. God did not promise to build his church in America. You have no reason as Americans to think that the kingdom of God and the American dream are the same thing. Let me encourage you that Christ is building his church. But we need to recognize that we have a major problem here.
2. We need to humble ourselves before the Lord. I think we’ve been too proud, perhaps, as to our social power-we’re the moral majority. I think we need to confess and humble ourselves before God. I don’t know how much of what’s happening in this world is the fault of poor Christianity and bad discipleship, and I’m not about to try to make a calculation. But probably we have not been the kinds of Christians we needed to be. You look in your own heart and ask yourself that question.
3. Contend for the truth in obedience to Scripture. The Bible is our worldview, and we have become biblically illiterate. We have pablum in our church services. Our services have become mere spectacles of entertainment, and the gospel we hear is such a reduction of what the Bible is trying to tell us about God, it’s sad. We need to understand the Bible’s worldview.
4. We need to contend in prayer. We need to become a praying people. As we see the problems around us, maybe the Lord is poking us that it’s time to become people of prayer all over again. There is a wonderful scene in chapter 4 of the book of Acts, where the church prayed while surrounded by all the enemies. As they prayed, the place shook by their prayer. God wants to do good things with us, even in the midst of these difficult times, and it will be by contending in prayer.
5. I happen to believe that we need to create a whole counter-culture in modern America, a counter-culture of excellence, art and beauty. Our churches need to realize that the culture is being dumbed down. If Christians don’t understand that our God who saves us is the Creator, then who will? Who will maintain the beauty and the power of the Creator’s hand if we don’t? Our schools are in a mess. Our children, and really all of us, are so hooked on that one-eyed monster in the corner that we can’t think anymore. You come home from work, you’re so exhausted, you know. You need this time of relaxation, of being dumbed down. Well, why don’t you go on a fast from television for just one week? Try it. What would you do with all those evenings? We need to be those who are concerned about creational structures, about the God of beauty and of intelligence. It’s a wonderful thing that we have that as a challenge to us. Christians don’t have to be the dummies in society.
6. We need to preach sin, guilt, and the cross, and the eternal consequences of turning away from God, namely hell. We have been so nice for too long. But I bet if you went to a doctor when you thought that you might have some kind of growth somewhere on your body, you would not be happy if the doctor said, “Don’t worry. Just take a few aspirin.” You’d want a doctor that would say, “I’m going to get to the root of this problem.” You’d respect that doctor. That’s the way our preaching needs to be. It needs to bring people to the root of their problem, not stick bandaids on them and give them aspirin.
7. We need to preach the whole counsel of God, and that means preaching God as both Creator and Redeemer.
8. We must practice being creational people in the way we establish our homes-willing to exercise parental guidance and loving discipline, for instance. Children must be willing to be submitted to their parents. We have a massive problem in America-children don’t want to submit themselves to their parents. And it’s just as bad in the church as it is in the society. We’ve not taught our children to be creational children.
9. In our marriages we need to express the creation as God has revealed it in who he is as the Father. We must be Christ-like husbands and faithful, submissive wives. Like God, we must hate divorce. America leads the world in divorce. Isn’t that wonderful? This great Christian nation is built upon the breaking of promises all over the place, and this is often justified by Christian leaders, many of whom have also been involved in divorce. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to make you feel like the Lord will never look at you if you’ve been divorced. That’s not the case. But I do think we need to take up this issue once more and look at the way God looks at divorce. The Scriptures say he hates divorce.
10. We need to respect the creational structure in our churches as well-how we organize ourselves, how we are as males and females in the church. Some people think that once you walk into church we all become angels. But you see, the creational structures apply in the church as well as they do anywhere. But some of our churches are just eliminating all the distinctions, as if that is the truth of the gospel.
11. We need to be willing to suffer and to be faithful even when it hurts. I won’t develop this subject, but I’m reading through Revelation and those letters to the churches in Asia and Turkey. After almost every one it says, “He who overcomes will receive.” Many of those churches were called upon to suffer. This is after the resurrection. I think sometimes we think that Jesus did all the suffering, so we get all the goodies. But here in these seven churches we get an example of the way Christ looks at the church, then and now. We are called upon to overcome, to suffer, even in the place where Satan has his synagogue. We will suffer if we do what the apostle Paul did-open our mouths. In Revelation 3:14 Christ describes the church there as neither hot nor cold. He wants hot Christians, in other words. He doesn’t like lukewarm stuff. The parable of the talents-the guy who buried his treasure because he wanted to play it cool-actually is condemned by Jesus. He wants risk takers. He wants people willing to open their mouths and take risks for the kingdom of God.
12. We need to pick up once more the call to holy living, to accept the standards of holiness that God has established. We’ve been far too long accepting: “You’re OK; I’m OK and God’s OK and everything’s OK. It doesn’t matter really what we do.” God calls his people to be a holy people. In a time where sin is called holiness and evil is turned into good, how much does our culture need to see real holiness, “that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”